The present invention relates to the viewing of images on various devices including, but not limited to, CRT, LCD, TFT, electro-luminescent, plasma, and DLP displays. More particularly, the present invention relates to navigating displayed images by zooming in and out (zooming, panning) and multi-dimensional roaming such displayed images at various levels of zoomed sizing. The images can be geographic (terrestrial and astronomy), chemical and biological compound and organism structures, anatomical structures of plants and animals, graphical representations of complex data and combinations (e.g., data on demographic and resource distribution over a geographical area). Such images tend to be massive in size, but require fast navigation and a high degree of resolution to be useful.
There is a focus for purposes of this invention on images larger than two gigabytes in uncompressed twenty-four bit RGB color space, but other images can be handled beneficially through the present invention. High-resolution digital imagery has only been available to the general public for about the last two years, but much longer in military and industrial settings. Presently, systems that are available for general usage to view very large images in real time are very expensive and contain unnecessary technology for the task at hand. Examples of such a systems are Silicone Graphics, Inc.'s Onyx® family of computing systems (Mountain View, Calif.). Current systems capable of loading/reading an image over two gigabytes in size will pass the image contained on the disk drive through a 3D graphics engine before displaying it. Due to the current speed limitations of these 3D graphics engines, the quality of the image displayed on the screen ultimately suffers. Current systems read the image from the hard drive as a bmp, rgb, or tif file.
Other systems and methods that attempt to improve imagery navigation are described herein below. The contents of each of these references are incorporated by reference.
A System for Managing Tiled Images Using Multiple Resolutions is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. Re. 36,145, filed Apr. 30, 1991. The system defines an address space for virtual memory that includes an image data cache and a disk. An image stack for each source image is stored as a full resolution image and a set of lower-resolution subimages. Each tile of an image may exist in one or more of five different states as follows: uncompressed and resident in the image data cache, compressed and resident in the image data cache, uncompressed and resident on disk, compressed and resident on disk, and not loaded but re-creatable using data from higher-resolution image tiles.
A Method for Storage and Retrieval of Large Digital Images is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,835, filed on Nov. 14, 1995. Image compression and viewing are implemented with (1) a method for performing DWT-based compression on a large digital image with a computer system possessing a two-level system of memory and (2) a method for selectively viewing areas of the image from its compressed representation at multiple resolutions and, if desired, in a client-server environment.
A method enabling a Fast Processed Screen Image is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,222,562, filed Jun. 23, 1998. The method includes a display process for displaying predetermined image data in a computer that includes a processor, a fast memory, and a video system having a video memory, comprising the steps of: during a computer execution period, writing contents from a block of the fast memory to a first memory, the fast memory having an access time which is less than an access time for the video memory; writing predetermined image data into the block of the fast memory; processing the predetermined image data from the fast memory; and writing the processed predetermined image data to the video memory.